Emma-Louise Boynton - Contributing Editor
This week’s choice of entertainment
This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what our post-pandemic world might look like - how it might be different. Worse? Improved? The phrase ‘build back better’ is being bandied around a lot at the moment, but the blue-sky political thinking and attendant policy-making that is surely requisite to this promising sloganeering seems lacking. And so in pursuit of some inspiration I’ve returned once again to one of my favourite BBC radio series - ‘My Perfect Country’. Over the course of some 22 episodes, the show explores policies that have worked in countries all around the world in order to imagine what a manifesto for a ‘perfect country’ might look like if we pulled all these brilliant policies together. Something to make you hopeful.
Where I’m spending my weekend
Earlier this week, I took a wander around poet, author and artist, Charly Cox’s new exhibition ‘Wish you were here’ on Greek Street. A lifelong hoarder, Charly’s exhibit showcases a miscellaneous collection of things she’s stuffed under her bed over the years - from a collage showing all the receipts she’s held onto after dates (both good and bad), to a framed pair of slippers she wore when she sat at a bar in LA sipping on whiskey while new in the knowledge that her boyfriend was cheating on her, to a little framed box with the window lock from her childhood home in it (she figured that if she took out the lock, her parents wouldn’t be able to sell her beloved home. ‘Who would want to buy a house in which you couldn’t lock the windows?’ She rationalised).
Scrawled across each of these framed odes to her past is a poem capturing the symbolic, often sad, memory held in whatever throwaway item she’s transformed into an art piece. As I walked around the show I had goosebumps, and started to cry silent tears as I stood in front of her collection of date-receipts. It made me think with a new appreciation about how the trails of things I leave behind, however big or small, are all reminders that whatever I do or don’t achieve, however much money I make, whoever I become, ‘I woz ere.’ And there’s value in that.
I’ll be going again this weekend, with my best friend in tow.
Charly Cox: Wish You Were Here: Postcards from the Past exhibition. (Runs from 30 June to 7 July at 59 Greek Street, Soho).
Something I’m looking forward to
While pondering what’s possible in this post-pandemic world I happily stumbled across a review for Anna Neima’s temptingly titled new book ‘The Utopians: Six Attempts to Build the Perfect Society’. I promptly ordered a copy and requested Anna join us on The Stack for a future Culture Shot book club, which she has kindly agreed to. Details to be announced soon. So, get to reading.